Diary of a very long year: 

Diary of a very long year: 

Context

• The article analyzes the impact on India-Pakistan relations after the surgical strikes, the challenges and India’s role as a regional stabilizer.

Importance of surgical strikes

• It has been one year since the special forces of the Indian Army carried out surgical strikes to destroy terror Launchpad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
• The surgical strike from India was a point that the Line of Control is not a line that cannot be breached.

Impact on India-Pakistan relations after the strikes

• It is important to take stock at this point on how India-Pakistan bilateral relations and the regional security situation have evolved over the past year since the strikes.
• The future direction of the foremost regional forum, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), remains unclear after India dropped out of the 2016 Islamabad summit in the wake of the Uri terror attack.
• The regional security situation remains, because of confused American policies in South Asia, continuing turmoil in Afghanistan, heightening India-China rivalry, and the India-Pakistan hostility.
• From a regional stability point of view, the surgical strikes do not seem to have had much of an adverse impact.
• The fact that Pakistan neither acknowledged the attacks nor responded in kind shows that the general deterrence between the South Asian nuclear rivals remains intact.
• It is easy to talk about nuclear use and threaten nuclear retaliation, as Pakistan has been doing for long. It is, however, not easy to translate such talk into action. In that sense, the surgical strikes have called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. And that certainly is good news for regional stability.
• But such higher-level stability seems to have come with heightened lower-level instability and that is the bad news.

What are the challenges?

• There are two sets of challenges that are more apparent today, one year after the surgical strikes.
• One, the India-Pakistan escalation ladder has become far more precarious today it has ever been in the past one and a half decades, i.e. since the ceasefire was agreed to in 2003.
• The recurrent, and almost daily, occurrence of border battles between the two militaries in Jammu and Kashmir today have a worrying potential for escalation to higher levels.
• The border stand-offs often lead to, as is evident from the data from the past 15 years, military, political and diplomatic escalation as well as contribute to escalating an ongoing crisis.
• While this was common even prior to the surgical strikes, the September 2016 operation has made ceasefire violations more worrisome in at least two ways: first, Pakistan has been retaliating ever since the surgical strikes by increasing the pressure on the frontlines; and second, surgical strikes have reduced the critical distance between ceasefire violations and conventional escalation.
• While stealthy surgical strikes may not qualify as conventional escalation, they certainly reduce the psychological distance between sub-conventional violence and conventional escalation in the classical sense. That is bad news for regional stability.
• The second challenge is more practical than theoretical. Surgical strikes could easily offset the logic behind such familiar and analytically elegant scenarios.
• The perils of preventive strikes are unpredictable. Preventive strikes are pregnant with immense potential to lead up to a ‘competition in risk-taking’, a tendency already prevalent on the frontlines of the India-Pakistan border in J&K.
• Preventive strikes in hyper-nationalist bilateral settings could defy our expectations and go out of control, with disastrous implications.

Have the surgical strikes helped the country’s overall national security environment?

• There are two reasons why the strategy of punishment may not have worked. For one, a strategy of punishment requires consistency and commitment.
• The momentum achieved by the surgical strikes was not followed up (despite several attacks thereafter), nor was the government committed to its declared determination to respond firmly to terror strikes, thereby lacking in both consistency and commitment.
• Second, and more importantly, Pakistan’s responses thereafter of supporting insurgency in Kashmir, aiding infiltration across the border, and allegedly supporting attacks on the Indian army convoys and bases continued without much reaction from New Delhi.
• This has led to a visible lack of credibility on New Delhi’s part which makes one wonder whether, bereft of domestic political use, there was any strategic planning behind the September operation.
• Surgical strikes may have been a tactical victory for New Delhi, but its strategic value is far from settled.

Concerns and the bigger picture

With two hostile neighbors on either side, terror attacks against India on the rise, and the South Asian neighborhood unsure of India’s leadership any more, New Delhi has a lot to be concerned about the continuation of its pivotal position in the region and the nature of its future engagement with it.

• The events since September last year have further contributed to South Asia’s regional ‘insecurity complex’.
• For a country that has traditionally been the regional stabilize, New Delhi seems to be quickly embracing the virtues of geopolitical revisionism.
• The costs of aggression, self-imposed regional exclusion and an absence of strategic altruism are bound to become starker sooner or later.